One of the advantages of making a sports documentary, at least in theory, is that you avoid the pitfall of so many other types of non-fiction film: the lack of footage. If you’re making a movie about a band or a performer, there may be relatively little filmed evidence of them working at their craft; if you’re making a ...

Great novels -- and Philip K. Dick's unsettling 1962 alternate history The Man in the High Castle is certainly a great novel -- tend to have in common the fact that much of their greatness is in their ability to communicate the internal. From their omnipotent viewpoint, they can use language to its utmost capacity, delive ...

The minimum wage went up in San Francisco and, blaming the cost of doing business, the overrated burrito hucksters at Chipotle hiked up their prices. Predictably, conservatives popped their collective gaskets, and everyone on the right started screaming "ENJOY THE BITTER FRUITS OF YOUR COMMUNIST WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION, LIBTA ...

In a recent review of Ernest Cline's new novel, Armada -- the poorly received follow-up to his hugely successful '80s geek-culture wallow Ready Player One -- io9's Germain Lussier makes the curious claim that it is "an ultra-nerdy book, but at times, it feels like it doesn't trust the reader." Replace that but with be ...

One never expects an atomic bomb to go off in such a quiet way.It's also never supposed to be in the form of a long, lovely, exquisitely detailed shaggy dog joke. But Jim Jarmusch's groundbreaking, entirely wonderful Stranger Than Paradise -- which, astonishingly, is 31 years old this month -- is exactly that: its form ...

TONY STARK, "IRON MAN": Look, I like all these people. I think relationships are important and there's nothing wrong with being chummy with the people you work with. But as long as I'm providing the lion's share of the funding, this is a business, and it's going to be run like a business. I didn't g ...

Today is the Fourth of July, the day the United States celebrates its independence and the day we all celebrate a nation founded as an ideal, a project, an attempt at changing the rules by which nations were governed. On the Fourth of July, I have always followed the advice of the late, great Paul Fussell, who said it was ...

So, while I was researching yesterday's post about NewsRadio and its tragic lack of availability on streaming media, I happened to discover that the entire series is available on YouTube, although the legality of the uploads is somewhat murky. But better than that, I discovered that if an uploader does not supply close-c ...

To commemorate his unceremonious dumping by a wide range of belatedly embarrassed corporate entities, I have been thinking a lot about the man who will not be our next president, Donald "Mayonnaise" Trump. Young people today may only know him as the talentless, egomaniacal clown behind The Apprentice who has helped make t ...